It is hard to measure Vincent Thomas Lombardi’s impact on the city of Green Bay, the Packers franchise, and the National Football League, but we’re going to give it a shot. The Packers’ stadium and front offices are located at 1265 Lombardi Avenue, a street named after the coach who won five NFL titles in nine seasons, spanning from 1959 to 1967.
Then again, plenty of notable people in other cities are honored with street names. Green Bay-area motorists drive on Holmgren Way, Mike McCarthy Way, and Brett Favre Pass.
There is a Lombardi statue—a 14-footer with a four-foot base—located outside Lambeau Field that draws hundreds of thousands of photo-taking fans per year. A lot of people are honored with statues, particularly athletes, so that isn’t exactly unique.
The NFL’s Super Bowl trophy carries Lombardi’s name. And, you’ll see replicas of all sizes in bars, bowling alleys, and backyards throughout Titletown. There are plenty of folks with trophies named in their honor. John Heisman, Cy Young, Larry O’Brien, Hobey Baker, and Lord Stanley spring instantly to mind. There was a Broadway play about Lombardi and a best-selling biography, but Hamilton and countless others have experienced similar honors.
How many people, though, can say they have their own time zone? Since 2012 the clock over the Bellin Health Gate at Lambeau Field has been set to “Lombardi Time,” which is to say it is 15 minutes fast. Legend has it that Lombardi demanded that players, assistant coaches, and team attendants arrive for practice, meetings, travel, and other appointments 15 minutes before the scheduled time. “If you weren’t early, you were late,” Hall of Famer Dave Robinson said, echoing what dozens of other players from the glory years said of their coach. Although its usage may have waned in recent years, a generation of Baby Boom-era parents in Green Bay, De Pere, Ashwaubenon, and surrounding areas implored their kids to get ready for school, church, and family functions on “Lombardi Time.”
When the Packers unveiled the giant clock—which faces Lombardi Avenue—in 2012, they considered installing a “Lombardi Time” sign underneath. They didn’t. Several people called the team offices to point out the time was off, but then Michele Tafoya broke the news during a national broadcast of a Packers-Lions game in December of 2012. “We decided not to announce it. We thought the best way to do it would be to let it come out naturally,” team president Mark Murphy told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “It will be kind of an urban legend. It will be the kind of thing that people will now look at when they come to Lambeau Field and talk about it.”
A half-century after his passing, folks in Green Bay still talk about Lombardi—and not just in reference to the time. A Brooklyn native who had spent the previous five years as the halfbacks coach for the New York Giants, Lombardi was hired by Green Bay on January 28, 1959. The Packers were coming off a franchise-worst 1–10–1 record, and “Titletown” hadn’t experienced a winning season in 11 years. That changed instantly thanks to a man whose only previous head coaching experience had come at St. Cecilia High School in Englewood, New Jersey. “I’ve never been associated with a loser and I don’t expect to be now,” Lombardi said at his introductory press conference, which marked the culmination of infighting among the 45 members of the board of directors, who might as well have been The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.
The board had considered hiring Forest Evashevski, the head coach at the University of Iowa, but settled on Lombardi, who demanded his fate be decided by the smaller executive committee rather than the full board. Longtime Milwaukee Sentinel columnist Bud Lea was in the crowd that day. “People were asking, ‘Who in the hell is Vince Lombardi?’” Lea recalled. “Well, it didn’t take very long for them to find out.”
A master motivator with a keen eye for talent who was relentless in his pursuit of perfection in both gameplanning and execution, Lombardi led the Packers to a 7–5 record his first season. In 1960 the Packers lost an agonizingly close NFL Championship Game against the Philadelphia Eagles. After that they captured five titles in seven years, including a run of three straight that began in 1965 and ended with triumphs in the first two Super Bowls.
Vince Lombardi poses after being named head coach and general manager of the Green Bay Packers in 1959.
Lombardi resigned as coach of the Packers on February 1, 1968, to focus on his duties as general manager. He left Green Bay the following year and spent one season as the head coach of the Washington Redskins. He died of cancer at age 57 on September 3, 1970.
• Lombardi’s legacy in Green Bay encompasses more than a street, statue, championships, trophies, or a clock tower. Consider:
• In 1961 he made the decision to add the “G” logo to the Packers’ helmets. The design and development included Gerald “Dad” Braisher and his part-time assistant, an art student at St. Norbert College named John Gordon, along with Romo Display Advertising of Green Bay.
• His final game in Green Bay, the Ice Bowl victory against the visiting Dallas Cowboys, is one of the iconic games in NFL history. The Packers overcame -13 degree temperatures and beat the Cowboys 21–17 on Bart Starr’s one-yard plunge into the end zone with 13 seconds left.
• Lombardi’s infamous power sweep became one of the more famous plays in football history.
In an era when racial tensions ran high throughout the nation, Lombardi lectured his team about intolerance and took steps to make sure black players were treated fairly on the team and in the nearly all-white community. “If I ever hear ‘[n-word]’ or ‘dago’ or ‘kike’ or anything like that around here, regardless of who you are, you’re through with me,” he said. “You can’t play for me if you have any kind of prejudice.”
The Packers had just one black player, Nate Borden, when Lombardi arrived. He acquired several others, many of whom went on to Hall of Fame careers. In 1967 the Packers had 13 black players, and Lombardi always made it known to Fox Valley landlords and local business owners that he expected them to be treated well. “He treats us all the same—like dogs,” Henry Jordan famously said, perhaps only half-kidding. Lombardi made sure that the players stayed in the same hotels and dined in the same restaurants, no matter where the team traveled, and that roommate assignments were not made on the basis of race—a notion believed to be a league first.
Lombardi stressed character, discipline, sacrifice, and mental toughness. In his later years, he became a popular public speaker and—though he was a lifetime Democrat with conservative leanings in foreign policy, youth behavior, and other issues—both major parties considered him a potential candidate for public office.
A week after Lombardi’s death in 1970, the NFL named the Super Bowl trophy in his honor, and the seven-pound, 21-inch Tiffany’s-produced trinket is the standard for excellence by which teams and players are measured.